The silently skipped clarify (antipattern)

Situation. An internal console at a property group, running spec-driven development with an agent: specify -> clarify -> plan -> tasks, mirrored one-way into a paid tracker.

What happened. A slice went specify -> plan -> tasks with the clarify step never run - nobody noticed, because running it depended on someone remembering a command. The open decisions sat unresolved inside a spec that looked finished, and were on their way to a developer as "ready".

The antipattern. Process by memory: any loop step that fires only when a human recalls its name will be skipped, and the artifacts downstream will look done while carrying the gap. The user cannot be blamed - they never knew the step existed.

What the standard does about it. The loop is AI-led and gated in layers (five of them - a skill-level precheck, the gate script, the policy doc that states the rule, loaded context, and a script-level bridge precondition): clarify chains automatically after specify; plan/tasks/mirror are mechanically blocked unless the spec has a ## Clarifications section and zero open [NEEDS CLARIFICATION]; the gate is what earns Status: ready-to-develop. None of the five is a Claude Code hooks/-mechanism hook - this repo's three shipped hooks guard unrelated risky Bash commands, and "does a skill cover this request" is a judgment call no hook can make.

Where it lives now. standard/specs/README.md ("Make the loop self-triggering"), standard/specs/enforcement.md (the clarify gate, and the scripts that call it as a bridge precondition), ADR-010, the "loop runs itself" section of the AGENTS template.